Everything
happens as if it were a matter of the conscious destruction of realism, for the
benefit of another reality, one whose essence is purely mythological. Not the
mythology of the West, as we’re invited to believe, but that of the cinema
itself. One thinks a little of The
Longest Day where, like here, the face of History fades behind the faces of
the actors who incarnate it, a Grand Parade of all Hollywood. There are no more
characters, just a giant “show.” The viewer can only be the ‘conscience of the
show.’ The two seams and the roundness of the Cinerama screen inevitably
increase this feeling.

The first
programs – eye-catching documentaries where the Fitzpatrick’s aesthetic was
increased as much as possible – accommodated themselves somewhat poorly to a
particularly heretical process. To narrate a story with this all-consuming
tool, even one reduced to its simplest expression, bordered on being an impossible
challenge. You can’t scorn the auteurs, then, for having tried. At least the
dialectical linearity of the screenplay allows the imagery to assert itself, a
point so elementary at heart as might have been feared. Or rather, a heroic
naivety that joins the film, through an unexpected detour, to the spirit of the
pioneers whose gesture it had been charged to sing. Hathaway – this honest
illustrator who sometimes emerges from a sage-like sleep to suddenly become
passionate about the rhythm of a fight – knew to conserve in his work the
academic dignity expected from him. If he works in convention, he also allows
the film to exist, a film that has, precisely, certain conventions of American
cinema.

It is not, for
all that, a revisionist western, but the sum of ideas that one generally can
have of the western when it is imagined as an epic. It obviously is lacking the
seed of madness with which the epic imposes itself, but Hathaway isn’t Vidor,
and it’s Vidor who would have been needed. You think more or less about all
this during the screening and your own ideas added to what is happening onscreen
banish any boredom, all the more so as the awaited and thundering bravura
sequences every ten minutes arrive just in time to avoid any hint of drowsiness.
In short, all this sticks out disagreeably, a kind of cocktail of the mind, a circus,
a rodeo, and comic strip.

After the
entr’acte, a mother’s sudden farewell to her son who is leaving for the Civil
War – on the family farm, with the patch of graves and blooming trees –
instills the serenity of the old legends, a biblical, elegiac tone that is
unable to prevent, in spite of everything, a certain emotion from arising. Then the red
uniforms shine like stripes on the blue of the night, the canons boom, the dead
are stiff with fear like in a painting by Gros, the blood on the table where
the wounded are operated on is cleared off with big buckets of water, the door
opens and Wayne appears as Sherman, muddy, unkempt and tired, like himself in
his stubborn, catlike approach. It’s John Ford’s passage, an incredible
anthology, with a superior, elegant form that one takes as either good-natured
or routine.

In fifteen
minutes, everything is said with a Griffithian sharpness; thenceforth the show
fades and seems worn out. It’s a bad idea to mix cinema into this parade.